Why do people file-share?
By Matt EarpA plain and (deceptively) simple question, but one that I think is vital to come to terms with in this discussion. How you think about this question probably has a big effect on how you think about VCL in general. In the sense that VCL is a system predicated as response to current behavior, but like any good system designers/philosophers, it’s important for us to understand (or at least try to understand) people’s habits and thoughts that underly those behaviors.
There is precious little hard data on this, but people are very quick to ascribe reasons, everything from “Because all information should be free and paying for copyrighted works is morally wrong” to “because some people are criminals and have no morals about stealing”. But I’m curious to what people think about this in 2008, given that Napster 1.0 is 8 years behind us, given that there are now a range of options for digital music acquisition, given that the RIAA has had nothing if not a visible presence with their legal campaign. Dan Levitin, I’m especially curious to hear what you might have come across on this in research your book.
This can be a charged question, and of course there might be many reasons, so lets keep it civil.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:07 am
I don’t think there is a single all-encompassing answer to why people make infringing uses of file-sharing systems.
Some do it because they want free music and don’t care about the harm they might be causing. Some see it as a form of protest against perceived injustices in the music industry. Some use it to sample music they might want to buy later. Some do it because they want an all-you-can-eat service but can’t find an available service they like.
Some file-sharers don’t pay for music at all; and some buy a lot of music.
We don’t have a good empirical fix on the relative sizes of these different groups. Lots of people have gut feelings, but the careful studies that have been done don’t paint a clear picture.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Ed did a fantastic job of encapsulating all the reasons for file-sharing that I could think of, so I’ll propose a related question which, if answered, should give us the same information.
Why wouldn’t people file-share?
Somehow listening to music improves your evolutionary fitness, or else people wouldn’t do it as often (ok, a big, but reasonable leap). Perhaps it works by giving you a social or cognitive edge. Since all animals tend to optimize their fitness given the tools available, we should all be choosing the lowest cost (optimal) method to getting music. File-sharing has a low barrier to entry, it is free up front, and a expensive but rare penalty. There are many behaviors with those qualities (e.g. speeding on the freeway) that have been extensively studied, so perhaps we should examine those.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
As you know, Matt, there are many many reasons people fileshare. When I’ve fired up a filesharing client, it’s typically for one of a few reasons: 1) to check and see what tracks are leaking out near me (in a network sense)… often there are entire albums leaked well before a release date; 2) to find things I can’t find via commercial services (unreleased, bootleg, public domain, homemade, mashups, a cappellas, instrumentals, etc.) and 3) if I need an “unencumbered” work that I can edit, reuse, quote from, etc. (funny here that part of me is weighing possible copyright infringement with DMCA violation).
April 11th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I’ve never used a file sharing network, but I’ve been inside of them to take a look and I make my own music available on BitTorrent.
I’m a strong advocate for filesharing. To that end I’m building a Samantha2P with my site, SMtvMusic.com. As artists, we need people to share our music no matter how successful we become. Yes Fergie needs people talking about her and burning copies of her CD. There are 6 billion people in the world and if one tenth of them buy the CD and the rest burn copies, who isn’t happy with this equation? If the burners become fans, they will most likely buy the next album.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
I highly recommend Chuck Klosterman’s take in this month’s Esquire magazine: http://www.esquire.com/features/chuck-klostermans-america/klosterman-0408
Personally, I think all the political reasons cited to justify file sharing (e.g., none of the money goes to artists) are pretexts. The simplest explanation is that the vast majority of file-sharers like being able to grab songs for free, and they don’t see any harm in doing so. Either they know nothing of copyright law, and so assume that if it’s available online that must be OK, or they look at file-sharing as a way to experience music they wouldn’t have paid for anyway. To the latter group, it’s like jaywalking. They know there are rules against it, but the rules seem pointless when there’s no traffic. They may also have a sense of entitlement because they spend a fair amount of money on CDs and concerts.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Isn’t the more important question for purposes of this discussion is whether anything can realistically be done to stop the behavior (or substantially reduce it) in the aggregate? Here, I think the evidence is strong that there are no realistic mechanisms available. We’ve tried:
1. legitimate, convenient alternatives (iTunes, etc), although hobbled by high cost and (still) limited inventory (I just tried getting Kate Bush’s most popular album, and it’s still not on iTunes).
2. litigation against software developers (Napster, Aimster, Grokster, LimeWire);
3. litigation against end-users (30,000+ targeted now);
4. extensive efforts at moral suasion in the form of PSAs, etc.
If these efforts haven’t meaningfully reduced file-sharing (and they haven’t), and we can’t come up with other mechanisms that do not inflict other costs that outweigh their benefit, does it matter why file-sharers do it?
April 12th, 2008 at 6:38 am
People are generally persuaded not to commit anti-social acts by peer pressure and the fear of being caught. Since file-stealing is generally done in private with very little risk of detection, these moral controls aren’t operative.
Technology makes this possible, and everybody wants something for nothing, so there you are, massive theft and not a thing to do about it.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
The question is too vague to have a real answer.
If you ask, “Why do people copy files?” the answer is because it is a natural and normal activity to copy information for a host of reasons:
* to make backups
* to share what you have with your friends
* to create modifications in the hope that you might improve the work (but still keep the option of going back to the original)
* to promote some particular work that you think is good
* because humans instinctively imitate, which is the fundamental basis of copying
If you are asking, “Why do people ignore copyright law?” then you might have:
* because law is complicated and confusing, copyright is particularly so
* because people ignore lots of laws when they can get away with it
* because tracking down the license terms of each work is really tedious
* because we see business regularly ignoring the rule of law and getting away with it (yes, I’m talking about you Sony: rootkit, multiple copyright violations, etc)
* because the chance of being caught is small
* because many young people have a bleak outlook on the future, so it makes sense to enjoy what you can now
If you are asking, “Why do people not respect the morality of following the license terms ?”
* because the copyright industry has had a fair suck on the sauce bottle and still wants a whole lot more
* because it is not obvious how license terms relate to everyday morality
* because the existing entertainment industry have demonstrated numerous examples of immorality and bad faith in the past
* because the majority of creative authors are poorly compensated under our existing system, demonstrating that this system is a failure
* because the handful of creative authors that ARE well compensated are so hugely well compensated that they won’t miss a bit
* because so many laws are widely removed from morality that it just doesn’t matter anymore
* because morality itself has largely been replaced by a “make money by whatever means” mentality
* because so much really nasty stuff happens every day (you know, starting wars to steal oil, that kind of stuff) that copying a few songs is trivial
An equally valid guess would be that it once did improve your fitness thousands of years ago, when humans were tribal and music was an active social activity. Now that music has become a passive antisocial activity, we have not had sufficient time to breed out the attraction to music.
April 13th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
From my own research, I think the reasons for filing sharing fall into four broad categories:
1) Ignorance that it is (sometimes, in some forms) against the law and/or unethical
2) But that’s just what everybody does (an argument applicable mostly to people under the age of 22, who have spent most of their conscious lives in a world where music was always free)
3) The “one-more-download-won’t-matter” justification of the famous “Commons Problem”
4) A “moral” sense that music should be free, and therefore any laws that restrict it are anachronistic
For a given individual, the reasons may cross more than one category (these categories are not meant to be mutually exclusive). Categories 1 & 2 probably have a fair amount of overlap.
Expansion and emendation:
1) IGNORANCE.
There are still people who don’t know about the legal and moral debates. The debates are out there if you know where to look (NY Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Spin, and of course the web) but I can imagine that a teenager could go through life without having encountered them. There are many arcane laws that many of us remain ignorant of. In some jurisdictions, if you find cash on the street, it is NOT yours to keep, you have to make a good faith effort to announce the find and to locate the owner. In some jurisdictions it is against the law to be out on the street past a certain hour (curfew laws) or to leave your garbage cans on the street more than 8 hours after collection. The intermittent enforcement of laws can lead to widespread ignorance about them. (I’m just stating a fact here, not proposing that the police enforce the myriad petty and arcane laws on the books.)
2) EVERYBODY DOES IT.
These people look around and see all these distribution channels for music and assume it must be o.k. or someone (the government?) would have put a stop to it. This is similar to jay-walking, smoking if you’re under 18, talking on the cell phone in the car. . . The subtle difference between #1 and #2 is that people in this category KNOW it’s illegal (or unethical) but they don’t care because it is just what everyone does. It *seems* like such a minor infraction as to not worry about it. They don’t consider the consequences, especially in terms of #3. Note that this is NOT like sneaking into a movie theater through the back door, or taking an extra copy of the newspaper out of a vending rack that someone else had paid to open: these actions are regarded as illegal/unethical, yet the do-ers consider the (meager) benefit outweighs the potential
(nearly 0) risk or cost of getting punished.
3) THE COMMONS PROBLEM.
A famous problem in sociology and social psychology. Consider a common grazing area as was found in early American settlements. Anyone could put their cattle or sheep on the common pasture. At some point when the pasture becomes crowded, a law is passed to limit the number of livestock an individual could keep on the commons, let’s say 5 for the sake of argument. Clearly there is damage to the land if the pasture becomes overburdened. Each shepherd has an incentive to add one animal because his benefit is one more animal, but the cost of raising that animal is shared by everyone in the community. His net gain is +1 at a cost of, say -1/1000th. Because everyone performs the same calculation, or perhaps is worried about their neighbors having a competitive edge (they assume their neighbors are cheats) a given individual doesn’t see why HE should be the only sucker who doesn’t get the gain. Collectively, as everyone tries to maximize their own interests, the sum total of such individual actions can cause great damage to the commonly-owned resources. Pollution illustrates the commons problem in a reverse manner. Instead of taking too much out of an ecological system, the problem is putting too much in (e.g., sewage, chemicals, etc.). Each person or corporation figures that they can put in just a little bit and “it won’t matter.” The seductively evil aspect of this logic is that in a limited sense, it is true: the ecosystem can handle small amounts of pollutants. The problem is of course when everyone thinks they are the only one doing it.
The file sharing problem is similar. If one acknowledges that creators of artistic works have the right to earn a living, one must be taught that if everyone thinks this way, the artists end up with nothing and are soon driven out of business.
4) MUSIC SHOULD BE FREE
This is an old argument and in our lifetimes, the most salient time when it first appeared was during the 60s and the summer of love. My late colleague Bill Graham used to say that when he was presenting live concerts in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco during the summer of love, and charging tickets to see shows with Janis Joplin, The Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, and The Grateful Dead all on the same bill, hundreds of people would complain about there being tickets. “Music should be free, man. You’re a capitalist pig!” they would shout at him. Bill would then explain, patiently, that the musicians all had to pay rent on their apartments, had to buy their instruments and guitar strings and such. Apart from that, the workers who helped put on the concerts - the electricians, carpenters, truckers who hauled equipment, all needed to be paid. An entire micro-economy was being supported by those ticket sales. Graham made money, yes, but not a killing.
If music is free - if there is no music industry at all - the musicians will have to have jobs to pay their rent and food, and they’ll end up doing music as a hobby. Do you really want Bono or Joni Mitchell or Yo Yo Ma having to work a 40 hour a week job, come home tired, and practice and write music in that state? I don’t. Part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the right to choose one’s profession. l like living in a society with a class of artists, some of whom can devote full time to the pursuit of creative activities. The market decides who. (If there IS a market).
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There’s another aspect to this that is relevant. I believe that each of us has the right - what the British and Canadian courts call “moral rights” - to control the disposition, use and distribution of our own creative works. We have the right to choose whether to give it away or colect money. The psychological issue of course is that I may want my poem or song or novel to be heard by as many people as possible, and I may choose to distribute it for free. But is someone ELSE makes these decisions for me, or worse, starts to profit from my work, I’ll feel wronged. They have no right to make those decisions about my work.
April 14th, 2008 at 7:51 am
“There’s another aspect to this that is relevant. I believe that each of us has the right - what the British and Canadian courts call “moral rights” - to control the disposition, use and distribution of our own creative works. We have the right to choose whether to give it away or colect money.”
In British law the moral right only extends as far as the right to be identified as the author (and many contracts force you to undertake not to assert it!)
There is another confusion in your assertion. Why should so called “creative work” be treated differently from any other type? What is “creative” work anyway. If your plumber tried to tell you what you could do with your bathroom you wouldn’t be happy.
When you create something (whether it’s a song or a bathroom) you have total control over it right up to the point you sell it (or a copy) to someone. At that point you make a contract with the buyer - and the terms of the contract will dictate what rights you retain. This is the same for all activities - whether they have the “creative” label or not.
Typically the terms of the contract will be acceptable to both parties because the balance of market power between them is fair and so the contract will be respected.
However the balance of power in the creative industries typically favours the middlemen and they write contracts to suite themselves. Both the public and the artist lose out. To make doubly sure of this they lobby governments to get their unfair contracts elevated to the status of global law.
The consumers of music are then faced with a situation where the “standard” contract is unfair (no other contract is available) and hence many will feel justified in breaking that contract.
To resolve the problem the industry must be prepared to renegotiate its standard contract with the people - and come up with something that commands widespread support. That might mean that the middlemen will disappear (or at least reduce in number and profitablity) but it should be good for the artist and the public.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Re: Tel’s response — I thought Matt’s question was quite clear. And I don’t buy any argument that people feel a moral justification for flie-sharing based on the entertainment industry’s behavior. File-sharers don’t check whether an artist is self-released, on an indie label or signed to Sony BMG before deciding whether to download his or her music. Otherwise, no one would ever download Ani DiFranco. Does Sony’s rootkit fiasco or some labels’ bogus accounting justify downloading Ani’s entire catalog for free?
April 14th, 2008 at 10:17 am
The right to earn a living? Doing the thing that they decided to do, they have a right to demand they be paid for it? I might accept that they have the right to TRY and earn a living, but that’s about all. What would happen if we gave everyone the same “right to earn a living” regardless of what they happened to decide was a suitable career?
Well, you can call me a Communist, but I feel it’s only fair to point out that there’s a whole lot of people that do work a 40 hour week, come home tired and then try and enjoy whatever creative interest takes their fancy. Society can get by without the virtuosos (possibly poorer for it, depending on who you ask) but it cannot get by without the hard sloggers who actually hold the whole thing together. I’m not trying to write talent out of the picture all together and I respect that some people have more skills than others; but making money out of your chosen creative endeavor is a privilege. It’s a very special privilege offered to a very small number of people and in all of history we probably have artists and creative individuals earning more now than ever before and having greater freedom to choose their own direction too.
This, “I’ve got a right to be paid” thing smacks of serious ingratitude.
April 14th, 2008 at 10:57 am
First, I’ll point out that there is absolutely nothing intrinsically illegal, nor immoral about file sharing. The exponential growth of Open Source software has been supported by the ability to rapidly copy and share files between many people over great distance and is (to the best of my limited knowledge) fully legal and fully moral.
The way copyright law is structured, each file that you share has it’s own legal framework depending on the exact license conditions for that file. You appear to presume that because you can point to cases where certain files were shared in contravention of certain license requirements, that puts you in a position to cast judgements on the entire apparatus of communication. Seems amazingly arrogant to me.
Secondly, it’s foolish and pointless to be a highly moral person if everyone else around you just takes advantage. I’m happy enough to be doing “the right thing” if I also see reasonable evidence of other people around me also doing “the right thing”, and I don’t believe that this attitude is uncommon or illogical. I would further argue that morality doesn’t even make sense on a purely individual basis — if you were the only person on earth then what would be immoral? Morality does make sense in a social setting where the objective is to codify a set of behaviour that keeps people working as a team and discourages conflict.
What I’m getting at here is if the leaders in some sphere of endeavor demonstrate in a highly visible manner that they have absolutely no interest in anyone but themselves, and that they don’t believe that society’s rules apply to them, then the kick-on effect of such behaviour is that the little people further down the line figure that they might as well play be the same rules (or rather, lack of rules). The end result is that the entire culture shifts towards selfishness and non-cooperation (and I think it’s a fair estimate that we are in the final stages of that process).
And yes, there are innocent victims. Nothing exceptional about that.
April 14th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
“First, I’ll point out that there is absolutely nothing intrinsically illegal, nor immoral about file sharing.” No argument, but we’re not talking about all file sharing here. We’re talking about the rampant copying of music, which in the case of the major labels’ catalogs, is 100% unauthorized. That’s the vast bulk of what gets traded online, at least according to monitoring firms such as Big Champagne.
Each act of copying is subject to a fair-use analysis, and you could argue that it’s a fair use to download a copy of something you already own in another format. Even if that were settled law, what percentage of the billions of music files downloaded per year fit into that category? So let’s not pretend that there’s much of an argument over whether the lion’s share of the music file-sharing is legally justified.
“it’s foolish and pointless to be a highly moral person if everyone else around you just takes advantage.” If morality were measured by the degree to which it was personally advantageous, it would be hard to distinguish from greed. But I’m not looking to pick a fight over relativism. I don’t think morality really enters into file-sharers’ calculation. It’s tempting to overlay some quasi-political framework — some label executives are bad guys, therefore anybody who wants to copy whatever song files they wish has a moral green light — but I think it’s bogus for the masses of file-sharers. As I said above and other comments have suggested, I think people download songs because they don’t see a harm in it. If they really thought their copying was taking money out of someone’s cash register, most wouldn’t do it, even if they believed that they wouldn’t be caught (or that the person behind the cash register didn’t deserve the money).
April 14th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Tal writes:
“it’s foolish and pointless to be a highly moral person if everyone else around you just takes advantage.”
I strongly disagree. Morality is not determined by what others do. This is the whole point of “war crimes” tribunals, and most civilized people agree that when others around you behave immorally, it is not a free pass to join the herd. (I’m not equating downloading with war crimes, only making an analogy.) This is the reason that looting during national emergencies is a greater crime than simple burglary. In fact, the illegal downloading really strikes me as an equivalent of looting — people see everyone doing it and just assume it’s o.k. But it only takes a few moral-minded leaders to put a stop to this behavior, role models who make the case clear.
If there exist inequities and various unfairnesses in the way some artists are compensated, then the system should be changed, but anarchy is not the answer.
To clarify another point, I didn’t mean to imply that everyone in society has a right to earn a living in any profession. I don’t have the right to earn a living as a pilot if I don’t know how to fly a plane. But if I’m competent at something, I have just as much a right to have a level playing field in terms of trying to earn a living as anyone else in their field. In other words, although not everyone is equally qualified to be a plumber (to take Tal’s example), if as a plumber I invent some radically new plumbing technique, that expertise should be protected (and usually is via the patent system). Laws, regulations, statutes, and customs such as copyright and patents encourage innovation by rewarding it financially.
It is important to note that MOST musicians are working very hard and making very little money. Just taking the artists signed to major labels, which is an especially wealthy minority, 95% of them are only making 5% of the money. 95% of artists signed to major labels still have to hold down “straight” jobs. Neil Young’s backup band, Crazy Horse, work as drywallers during most of the year when they’re not on tour. This is not because of file sharing, it’s because the economics of being a musician were never that good for the vast majority of us.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Cool! This all sort of points to why I asked the question in the first place, because I firmly believe that ultimately the reasons are so various and so interrelated that it is impossible to maybe do better than maybe have general buckets for behavior (which joe, Ed, Tel, and Dan have all given great examples of).
When I lived in the East Village in 2000 in the heyday of Napster I knew digital-anarco-punks who were simply out to put ever song ever one an a node so the world could have it, but not because they believed music should be free, simply because they believed the imperative was for people to have music in the most efficient way possible. I’ve also known plenty of people “Just have this CD somewhere in the God Damn mess of this office and I haven’t been able to find it in two weeks” and so, why not get it in 2 minutes from limewire (maybe it was even that Kate Bush CD Fred couldn’t find on Itunes). These are two extremes, but I’d argue in that even the first had little to do with morality (although you could make an argument that it was by extension). As for the second example, several of the RIAA lawsuits have been exactly about that (EFF’s RIAA vs. The People 4 Years Later does a good job of tracking some of these instances, and I think make the RIAA look like a laughing stock.)
@Jon “I don’t think morality really enters into file-sharers’ calculation.” I whole-heartedly agree. I also have seen first hand people from the industry say that file-sharing is ONLY about this and NOTHING else. And for better or worse they have defined the debate and on a practical level, they are the people that need to be convinced to get any practical movement on this. I have seen it in the preliminary research I’ve done with students on the matter, the Morality word comes up an amazing number of times. It worries me.
@Fred - “If these efforts haven’t meaningfully reduced file-sharing (and they haven’t), and we can’t come up with other mechanisms that do not inflict other costs that outweigh their benefit, does it matter why file-sharers do it?” I truly want to get to the point where it becomes unnecessary to ask, and for people like me I’m already convinced we can get on to designing the practicalities (design that takes into account tough questions about payment, rights, fairness, equity, etc, but meaningful design). But as long as some define the debate ONLY in terms of a moral question, even in the face of statistics about 60 million Americans, in the face of evidence of the potential efficiency of file-sharing to PAY artists, and in the face of the historical mutability of copyright law’s implementations, it we be necessary to remind them that it’s a much more complex issue then than just morality. And thus they should stop framing it that way and ultimately drop the “why do people file-share question”, which I suspect they ask themselves constantly.
@Richard “To resolve the problem the industry must be prepared to renegotiate its standard contract with the people - and come up with something that commands widespread support. That might mean that the middlemen will disappear (or at least reduce in number and profitability) but it should be good for the artist and the public.”
w00t! Nicely put.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
“To clarify another point, I didn’t mean to imply that everyone in society has a right to earn a living in any profession. I don’t have the right to earn a living as a pilot if I don’t know how to fly a plane. But if I’m competent at something, I have just as much a right to have a level playing field in terms of trying to earn a living as anyone else in their field.”
No - there is a bit more to it than that. To earn a living in a given field obviously you need to be good enough at it but the profession also has to make economic and technical sense.
Pete Waterman wanted a career as a steam locomotive driver - but economic and technical circumstances changed - and he had to become a record producer instead - now he uses the money he makes from that to finance his hobby (and side business) of –steam trains. The point is that his second career could just as easily go the way of his first choice. When all the steam trains were scrapped no one stood up and demanded the right to make a living driving them (though at the time I personally would have supported them). There is no right for a given profession to make money - even for the very best practitioners. It is for society as a whole to put in place structures that enable it IF society wishes.
Part of the current problem is that the existing structures of patent and copyright are actually thinly disguised feudalism. The state (historically the King) grants a monopoly right to make income by certain technical processes (patents) or certain artistic works - in exactly the same way as it used to grant the right to graze animals on certain land or to hunt in certain forests.
April 14th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Great final point to, Dan. My partner likes to say the whole problem with file-sharing could be fixed with a working universal health-care plan for this country. In electronic music world, there is a very real brain drain from the US to Berlin, for no other reason than it’s possible to do what they want they want there in a way that’s not possible here in the States.
That’s what attracted me to the concept of VCL in the first place. Given the practicalities of today’s digital world, It’s the ONLY viable way I’ve yet heard of to get my friends payed for doing exactly what I want them to do (make music) and even does so based loosely on the “you made a thing, I give you some money to have that thing”. The underlying tenor of a lot of the arguments against VCL (not here on this thread but elsewhere) have to do with a sort of “lazy musicians trying to get ahead without working” attitude. But that’s exactly what I want! I’ll even happily dedicate my life to making it so they don’t have to work at anything besides what they want to, and I think taking advantaged of the potential of existing technologies to enact the best parts of the ideals that underlie copyright is a part of that equation.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Your question “Why do people file-share?” is a leading one, in that it refuses to admit the reality that many people do NOT file-share, and would be harmed by almost all your proposed “solutions.” In fact, I see that this issue has already been raised in this thread, and then promptly ignored.
As a non-file-sharer, am I to be compelled (the C in VCL) to pay royalties for commercial music that I don’t even listen to, let alone download? Where’s the consideration for all the people outside your one-size-fits-all analysis of this problem? Music is not a food group; nobody NEEDS to listen to it in order to live (otherwise deaf people would be in a real pickle, wouldn’t they?). Even listening to music is a voluntary activity — a luxury, in a sense.
I understand that you’re all being good nerds and trying to stick to your limited set of design elements, but you’re ignoring an entire segment of the public who would demonstrably suffer under any compulsory royalty regime. That makes this bad governance, and makes me reluctant to even listen to your arguments, let alone support them.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Disenfranchised — Try reading some of the other threads here, particularly the one on voluntary vs. compulsory. There’s plenty of support here for dunning only those Internet users who actually want to consume music this way.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
History is written by the survivors. Standing up to an authoritarian government and giving lectures on morality tends to be a low-percentage survival strategy.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Jon Healey: thanks for the suggestion; I’ll move on to another thread.
I do however think that the argument in this thread loses a lot of necessary perspective once the assumption that everyone is a filesharer becomes internalized. Re-examining a problem from a “why not” perspective is frequently the key to spotting analysis errors that are invisible from the “why” perspective. Please think about this, y’all, and see if you don’t think that it’s not strictly a rhetorical question, even in this context.
And to Michael, whose “evolutionary advantage” rationalization completely dumbfounds me: you ought to try harder to distinguish between nature and nurture. The compulsion so many people seem to have nowadays to give their lives a continuous soundtrack was created by record company marketing, not biology. Mightn’t this industry-created compulsion be yet another reason why people fileshare music — isn’t that the essence of the “drug pusher” metaphor?
April 15th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
“Disenfranchised”: Regarding your points, music existed before record company marketing. People sought it out then, they still do so. Your nature vs. nuture distinction is a straw man. The last metaphor is a particularly poor one (the drug pusher), since people have an innate biological mechanism for drugs, regardless of the pusher.
Let’s assume you had chosen a better metaphor to argue your point. I will defend my position of an evolutionary advantage arguments in that light. The mechanisms necessary for enjoying music are biological mechanisms which arose over a period of time to maximize the population’s fitness. Whether these mechanisms are being artificially manipulated now doesn’t really matter, because people would still perceive music as improving their fitness (i.e. rewarding) in the absence of any manipulation. To use your flawed analogy, people would still take drugs if the drugs were available in the absence of any pushers.
The basic argument remains: People should be trying to optimize their fitness, in this case maximizing their rewards while minimizing their cost. There are many, many similar behaviors that have been studied in this light that are analogous to file sharing.